> How much would a feature like image prefetching or packaging or ...> really add, relative to the overhead and complexity involved in> supporting it? One would get a marginal performance increase on> low-latency, high-bandwidth networks (which are rare -- in life, it> seems to be either high/high or low/low, excluding certain very rare> special cases) but not much else. Probably wouldn't even be> noticeable...

Actually on our local network between my workstation and the server it is
noticeable. Because for every connection the server must fork off a new
process, which then must do all its initialization, authorization checking and
the like, then pass the document down.

But I agree, the creepingfeature beasties have certainly popped up lately, of
which I am certainly guilty. No retrieving multiple images simultaneously is
not at all necessary (although would be nice). The problem here is that as the
Web becomes more and more used, everyone wants their little thing in it :)
Course id be happy to code the multipart get's into the NCSA Server and Mosaic
:)